C19th Reading Chair

A fantastic little early 19th Century upholstered reading chair, the curved yoke-shaped top rail and waisted back above a rounded and softly domed seat, gently flared over a plain frieze, raised on boldly turned mahogany front legs and plain splayed back legs with original Cope and Collinson brass caps and castors. Covered in a hand dyed sage green narrow chevron striped military linen enhanced by a hand stitched edge and spaced gimp pins at the base, each side retaining a single decorative brass eyelet securing a tie. English, circa 1840

Reading chairs appear to have first come into use in the 1720’s and 1730’s, to judge by the style of several surviving examples, including two in the Victoria & Albert museum. But this may have been a fairly short-lived fashion, or such chairs may have been know by another name, for ‘reading chairs’ are rarely, if ever, mentioned in C18th bills or inventories. At the turn of the C19th however, Thomas Sheraton published an updated version of the type in his ‘Cabinet Dictionary’ (1803), plate 5. He described this as an ‘arm-chair for a library, or a reading chair’, noting that it was ‘intended to make the exercise of [reading] easy, and for the convenience of taking down a note or quotation from any subject. The reader places himself with his back to the front of the chair, and rests his arms on the top of the yoke’.